The prosperity and growth synonymous with north Alabama in recent years is now facing a reckoning.
The region is confronting workforce demands to fill the thousands of jobs flooding to the area without the workforce to fill them, according to a labor market analysis commissioned by north Alabama elected leaders. It’s a dramatic counterweight to years of headline-grabbing job growth in the area as the time fast approaches to put workers into those jobs.
Deloitte performed the analysis and publicly presented its findings last week.
While elected leaders trumpeted the report as "exciting" and a validation of their growth plans and infrastructure preparation, Deloitte's presentation signaled a potential crisis on the horizon that will require an extraordinary effort to overcome.
In fact, Darin Buelow, global location strategy leader for Deloitte who gave the presentation at Huntsville International Airport, said a national recruiting effort is needed to attract people to fill the jobs – an effort he twice compared to the national all-hands-on-deck initiative to put men on the moon in the 1960s.
The numbers, according to Buelow: The Huntsville area must fill about 25,000 new jobs by 2023. And this demand comes at a time when Alabama is enjoying a record-low unemployment rate of 2.8 percent further strained by an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent in the Huntsville area.
"The only way to get some of those people is to get some of them to move here," Buelow said. "Sure, we can convert more of them that are in the economy now, maybe convert some of the non-workers and turn them into workers.
"But we need to also ramp up a moonshot effort to get people to be interested to move to this region."
Darin Buelow of Deloitte presents findings of a north Alabama labor market analysis on Nov. 21, 2019.
In other words, reflect on the legendary singular focus leading up to NASA’s 1969 moonshot … and duplicate it.
Launch 2035 -- an all-volunteer regional business-led initiative that has facilitated closer working relationships with the area’s elected leaders in Madison, Morgan and Limestone counties – hired Deloitte to study the labor market. The 25,000 jobs, the study said, will be spread among those three counties.
Buelow said he interviewed 94 employers in those three counties – which yielded an "unprecedented" level of analysis.
"Generally, in site selection, when we're evaluating a community, we might do six or eight or 10 employer interviews," Buelow said.
Buelow said those 94 interviews – 89 percent of which were with private companies – tallied 14,000 new jobs in the region over the next three years, "translating to approximately 25,000 direct, indirect and induced new jobs," according to Deloitte's executive summary.
"That's going to exacerbate the supply and demand gap that the Huntsville area experiences now," Buelow said. "Some concerns about the educational pipeline, if it can keep up with that demand for workforce and if the educational institutions can pivot effectively to the newest demands in cyber and IT that are rolling through the economy. This, combined with the aging workforce.
"As Baby Boomers get closer and closer to retirement, the employers in the region are concerned."
So even as rapidly-growing Huntsville is projected to become the state’s largest city in four or five years, the study suggests it needs to grow even faster. Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said that the city’s branding slogan of “Huntsville: A Smart Place” is a indication that the city is already in the recruiting business.
Banners in downtown Huntsville also describe the Rocket City as an "inclusive community" – which, at face value, would seem to be a welcome to outsiders. It also perhaps takes a stab at the state's conservative politics that might not appeal to people in other parts of the country.
Banners outside Huntsville's city administration building tout the city as building an "inclusive community."
“It is a challenge,” Battle said. "We know we have a challenge of 14,000 people coming into a three-county area. 14,000 people coming in and those people will also be coming from across a 16-county area across north Alabama and southern Tennessee. We have a plan to meet that challenge.
"As we continue to grow and we continue to prosper, we'll be able to keep up with the growth and we'll be able to build ahead of the growth so that we can keep that same quality of life tomorrow that we have today. Our greatest asset is our (average) 18-20 minute commute to and from work. If we can keep that and keep those other quality of life issues in place, we'll grow and we'll prosper."
That commute time will be a magnet for workers in larger cities, Madison County Commission Chair Dale Strong said.
"In many places in this country," Strong said, "you can't back out of your driveway in 18 minutes."
On specific cited by Battle was Huntsville partnering with the state of Alabama on the $250 million “Restore Our Roads” programs in which the city and state evenly split the cost of major road construction projects. It’s already led to improvements to Memorial Parkway – Huntsville’s prime north-south corridor – as well as ongoing construction to widen the highway leading to Redstone Arsenal’s main entrance.
“This is exciting,” Strong said of the study. "This is what our group has been working for. We want to make sure this is a place people want to raise their families.
"We're fixing to put a full-court press on recruiting, the finest and the brightest minds this world has to offer."
Another lure for the area, touted by Decatur Mayor Tab Bowling, is his city’s “Best and Brightest” program. For every year you live in Decatur city limits – without regard to where you work – the city will repay $3,000 of a STEM graduate’s student loan, up to $15,000.
"What we learn is whenever people come and visit our area, and they go out here and they get on the plane to take the return flight home, they look at their partner and say, 'I had no idea,'" Bowling said. "They love it when they come."
Bowling also pointed out the significance of the widening of I-565 – linking Decatur and Huntsville – that's planned for 2020.
Buelow agreed that the labor crunch is north Alabama, in a sense, being a victim of its own success. And while he said there is much to like about the Huntsville area, there is the issue of "perception."
"(Employers) report challenges in getting them on the national stage, changing the perception of a job in north Alabama, changing the perception of what it might be to pick up sticks where you are in the Bay Area or in Chicago or Dallas or New York and move to Huntsville," Buelow said. "And getting the word out about what huge advantages you have – those advantages in low-cost housing, lots of jobs, great schools, strong quality of life.
"You're able to check the box on just about everything an employee would want but getting the word out is going to be very important."
“It’s not going to be easy,” Strong said, who emphasize a need to ramp up recruiting at universities throughout the state as well as strong engineering schools nearby such as Georgia Tech and Mississippi State.
“Together, we’ll make this happen,” Bowling said. “We’ll meet our goals.”